USU professors awarded grant for quartzite research
The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to two USU faculty members to geochemically and microscopically fingerprint quartzite.
Bonnie Pitblado, assistant professor of anthropology and director of USU’s Museum of Anthropology, and Carol Dehler of the department of geology have teamed up to begin building a quartzite database that will allow archaeologists to gain a better understanding of prehistoric people and their movements across the landscape of the Rockies.
“I want to know how and where people from 9,000 years ago were able to make their tools as a proxy for human movement,” Pitblado said. “Connecting with people from prehistoric times through geochemistry is a great tool to understand and learn more about their way of life.”
In order for Pitblado and Dehler to do that, they had to create new methods by putting together chemical profiles for quartzite fingerprints that will eventually allow scientists to trace quartzite stones that prehistoric people once used as tools.
There were significant differences in the samples originally taken from the Gunnison Basin in Colorado, Pitblado said, which was enough research to propose those same methods to the NSF.
The NFS grant supports a collaborative research project which is coordinated through USU’s ADVANCE program. ADVANCE is a NSF-funded program designed to improve the recruitment and retention of women faculty in the sciences, technology, engineering and math fields (STEM). To achieve this goal, in 2004, ADVANCE initiated collaborative seed-grant support, a program designed to boost interdisciplinary research by female tenured professors in a STEM department.
There is an assortment of different sciences, Pitblado said, embedded in this project, and each one compliments each other a great deal. The small grant from ADVANCE opened many doors for significant national funding opportunities, she said.
“This grant will give us the tools to characterize the quartzite prehistoric people used and understand how they moved across landscapes through time and space throughout the world,” Pitblado said. “This will be significant for all earth scientists to benefit from the ability to recognize and characterize quartzite formations from a database.”
“Our project crosses disciplinary and departmental boundaries, bringing datasets and people together,” Dehler said. “Not only will these data add significant bulk to the global archaeology database, but they will also provide significant geochemical information for understanding the Proterozoic and younger geologic history of southern Colorado.”
With students from their departments as collaborators, the faculty members have presented the results of their ADVANCE-sponsored pilot study at four national and regional archaeological and geologic conferences. Their new NSF grant includes funds for a number of additional USU student research assistants, who will benefit from the opportunity to conduct and present original scientific research.
“These are the moments when you feel a connection to the past,” Pitblado said. “When you are able to make that bridge from 9,000 years ago to today is incredible. Any tools to get us there, we will embrace because that’s what this is all about. Success for all fields of science, success for the bigger picture.”